In only a handful of months the still fresh Laid imprint has made quite a name for itself. Despite being born in the shadow of its older brother label, Dial, Laid has quickly established its own area of expertise, pummeling record buyers with five solid singles of dance floor-primed house music while Dial vascilates between floor friendly and leftfield sounds. The sixth record to don a lux Laid sleeve is the first showcasing multiple artists’ originals, for which they’ve collected some of the freshest names around for a survey of the current state of deep house on both sides of the Atlantic. Hamburger Christopher Rau and New Yorker-cum-Berliner John Roberts are both members of the extended Dial family while New Yorker Fred P. has earned well deserved heaps of praise for his work as Black Jazz Consortium. It’s perhaps no surprise that Laid006 is about as solid a record as you can get, throwing three distinctive and in vogue sounds on one wax slab.

John Roberts claims to spend a lot of time tweaking tracks from his bed or couch. I find this both plausible and kind of baffling. While the American Berliner prodigiously crafts fresh-out-the-steam-room house tunes mirroring the laid-back circumstances of their creation, he populates his sides with some of the most hyper-tangible and painstakingly textured samples in deep house. Dance music nerds often fetishize records made on analog gear in elaborate custom recording studios, but shy of hiring an on-call chair massage crew, I just can’t see panel after panel of humming gear birthing ear candy as good-vibin’ and deceptively crafty as Roberts’s couch-and-MacBook music. Spooning a modular synth is also pretty difficult.

“Intelligence” is not a word that comes up often in house music. In this context, it almost seems like a challenge; this record wasn’t titled for “Soul” or “Sex,” or any of the other social concepts excessively invoked in dance discourse. Though an intellectual emphasis is unusual, it shouldn’t be a surprise; this EP is the inaugural release for Laid, a vinyl-only subsidiary of Hamburg’s reliable Dial, and features music by lesser-known Detroit heavy Rick Wade.

I first heard of Dial’s plan to start a deep house sub-label called Laid about two years ago. It sounded like a great idea; a way to bring in a fresh sound in what was then still a minimal-soaked dance music world. Finally in 2009 Dial’s younger brother was born with the first two records from Laid. Of course, a lot happens in two years of dance music history. Laid’s opening salvo comes after deep house has been “revived,” this time with the minimal bandwagon in tow, their vacuousness made only more obvious by all the a cappellas professing “soul.” After a wonderful inauguration by Detriot’s own Rick Wade, Oliver Kargl, best known as Rndm, continues to steer Laid into the deep end.